of Bauer’s Pretzel Emporium. We are indebted.
Byrne read these, and the rest. Agatha Spalding’s uninspired prose seemed to consist entirely of one night’s missteps due to “a nagging bladder that may require Miss Eugenia’s nightshade-elixir and a week’s bed rest.” He was trying to avoid growing thoughts of Marvel, left on a curb similar to the one where Byrne had found him. They had ended up walking to a bodega together. Byrne had gotten his brother some smokes. There had been a hug. Marvel wouldn’t take cash. He’d said he didn’t want to compromise his brother, Mr. Rock Steady, and had launched into some ska backbeat. Byrne figured his brother must have had enough speed for the night, or maybe the week, to be so magnanimous. Byrne had left Marvel that afternoon feeling unsatisfied, bitter, tightfisted—and headed back toward the skewered pig.
Save for the scrape of Byrne’s boots as he moved along the length of the glass coffins, the theater was dead, and dry. His throat hurt. Byrne coughed. He tucked Marvel into a less insistent part of his consciousness and walked backstage. Photographs lined the walls, but the light was dimmer. No matter, no captions to peruse. And no performance shots, of course. It was against sleight custom. The ones people managed to snap unofficially didn’t capture much. An odd lighting effect was occasionally in evidence, but no sleightist seemed capable of truly inhabiting a photograph; the camera seemed always to be pointed in the wrong direction.
The prints on these black walls were more formal portraits of early sleightists: one seated on a high-backed wicker chair in front of a potted palm, ankles primly crossed; one standing at a backstage door in a long coat left self-consciously unbuttoned to reveal a flash of web; a male sleightist posed in taut arabesque, an architecture suspended between his right hand and flexed left foot. There was a filmy portrait of a woman Byrne could only assume was Antonia Bugliesi herself. He was held, for a moment, by the intelligent face—its large eyes unusually wide and dark, maybe impossibly so.
Byrne pulled out a small camera to lessen the sudden onslaught of nakedness: what eyes she had. He preferred the spy feel—Byrne unknown. He took his third one-handed photograph of the trip. The first: a blond and blushing Amish or Mennonite girl in Lancaster, her braided head lowered, a billboard in the distance. The second: a butcher (mistaken in his perception that this tourist was about to buy a side of pork) jovially presenting the rendered corpse that had a few hours earlier sent Byrne down the alley to Marvel. The third: the portrait of Antonia hanging beside another photograph, that of a fop (handlebar mustache) amid a chorus line of female sleightists, arms so tight around the two on either side of him that their smiles seem forced, pained by the pressure of his cupped fingers on their hipbones.
11 After traveling in and out of oddity collections across Europe, in 1892 most of the document copies were sold to a protomuseum in Philadelphia. It is there they were found and navigated into performance by Antonia Bugliesi, once a student of Marie Taglioni—the first ballerina to have stood en pointe. Charles Dodd, a Philadelphia merchant, owner of the documents, and lover of Antonia, built her a small theater adjacent to his museum, allowing her to maintain its artistic direction. He required only that the performers dress provocatively enough to ensure both a profit and his continuing interest.
12 “Sleight is pure, a truly Western art form. Its seminal materials coalesced in the mind of one disturbed but blessed individual, the Jesuit brother Pierre Revoix, during his tenure at St. Magdalene’s mission in Santo Domingo in the late seventeenth century. No other art form can claim such singular beginnings. No other art was created in such divine, misguided mist. Revoix wrote in his journal that ‘these papers have great import,
Byrne read these, and the rest. Agatha Spalding’s uninspired prose seemed to consist entirely of one night’s missteps due to “a nagging bladder that may require Miss Eugenia’s nightshade-elixir and a week’s bed rest.” He was trying to avoid growing thoughts of Marvel, left on a curb similar to the one where Byrne had found him. They had ended up walking to a bodega together. Byrne had gotten his brother some smokes. There had been a hug. Marvel wouldn’t take cash. He’d said he didn’t want to compromise his brother, Mr. Rock Steady, and had launched into some ska backbeat. Byrne figured his brother must have had enough speed for the night, or maybe the week, to be so magnanimous. Byrne had left Marvel that afternoon feeling unsatisfied, bitter, tightfisted—and headed back toward the skewered pig.
Save for the scrape of Byrne’s boots as he moved along the length of the glass coffins, the theater was dead, and dry. His throat hurt. Byrne coughed. He tucked Marvel into a less insistent part of his consciousness and walked backstage. Photographs lined the walls, but the light was dimmer. No matter, no captions to peruse. And no performance shots, of course. It was against sleight custom. The ones people managed to snap unofficially didn’t capture much. An odd lighting effect was occasionally in evidence, but no sleightist seemed capable of truly inhabiting a photograph; the camera seemed always to be pointed in the wrong direction.
The prints on these black walls were more formal portraits of early sleightists: one seated on a high-backed wicker chair in front of a potted palm, ankles primly crossed; one standing at a backstage door in a long coat left self-consciously unbuttoned to reveal a flash of web; a male sleightist posed in taut arabesque, an architecture suspended between his right hand and flexed left foot. There was a filmy portrait of a woman Byrne could only assume was Antonia Bugliesi herself. He was held, for a moment, by the intelligent face—its large eyes unusually wide and dark, maybe impossibly so.
Byrne pulled out a small camera to lessen the sudden onslaught of nakedness: what eyes she had. He preferred the spy feel—Byrne unknown. He took his third one-handed photograph of the trip. The first: a blond and blushing Amish or Mennonite girl in Lancaster, her braided head lowered, a billboard in the distance. The second: a butcher (mistaken in his perception that this tourist was about to buy a side of pork) jovially presenting the rendered corpse that had a few hours earlier sent Byrne down the alley to Marvel. The third: the portrait of Antonia hanging beside another photograph, that of a fop (handlebar mustache) amid a chorus line of female sleightists, arms so tight around the two on either side of him that their smiles seem forced, pained by the pressure of his cupped fingers on their hipbones.
11 After traveling in and out of oddity collections across Europe, in 1892 most of the document copies were sold to a protomuseum in Philadelphia. It is there they were found and navigated into performance by Antonia Bugliesi, once a student of Marie Taglioni—the first ballerina to have stood en pointe. Charles Dodd, a Philadelphia merchant, owner of the documents, and lover of Antonia, built her a small theater adjacent to his museum, allowing her to maintain its artistic direction. He required only that the performers dress provocatively enough to ensure both a profit and his continuing interest.
12 “Sleight is pure, a truly Western art form. Its seminal materials coalesced in the mind of one disturbed but blessed individual, the Jesuit brother Pierre Revoix, during his tenure at St. Magdalene’s mission in Santo Domingo in the late seventeenth century. No other art form can claim such singular beginnings. No other art was created in such divine, misguided mist. Revoix wrote in his journal that ‘these papers have great import,
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